Background:
I maintain a WordPress blog that uses Jetpack’s Stats package.
Issue:
We started getting this error message when opening the ‘Stats’ page:
We were unable to get your stats just now. Please reload this page to try again. If this error persists, please contact support. In your report please include the information below. User Agent: 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0' Page URL: 'https://blog.server.tld/wp-admin/admin.php?page=stats& noheader' API URL: 'https://dashboard.wordpress. com/wp-admin/index.php? noheader=true&proxy&page= stats&blog=XXX&charset= UTF-8&color=fresh&ssl=1&j=1:5. 0&main_chart_only' http_request_failed: 'cURL error 6: Couldn't resolve host 'dashboard.wordpress.com''
The entire Stats block in the Dashboard was empty, and the little graph that shows up in the Admin bar on the site was empty as well.
Other errors noticed:
RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: cURL error 6: Couldn't resolve host 'wordpress.org' RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: cURL error 6: Couldn't resolve host 'planet.wordpress.org'
These errors were in the WordPress Events and News section, which was also otherwise empty.
This whole thing was ridiculous on it’s face, as the hosts could all be pinged successfully from said server.
I checked with Jetpack’s support, per the instructions above, and got a non-response of “check with your host.” Well, this isn’t being run on a hosting service so you’re telling me to ask myself. Thanks for the help anyway.
Resolution:
The machine in question had just upgraded PHP, but Apache had not been restarted yet. The curl errors don’t make much sense, but since when does anything in PHP make sense?
It was kind of a “duh!” moment when I realized that could be the problem. Restarting Apache seems to have solved it.
